March 2007 President’s Report

By Ira Pollack

            I hope all is well with you these cold and bitter days of winter. By the time that you read this edition of the newsletter we’ll have almost gone through our yearly election of Officers and Directors. I’d like to take the time now to thank everyone on the Board of Directors for their service to the Museum over the last two years. This is an important job of leading our Museum and making the many decisions that it takes to run our organization. I’d also like to welcome in the new directors to the Board. I will be looking forward to working with them in the near future. As always we have many challenges before us to meet.

            I must also let you know that this Board of Directors has approved a balanced budget for 2007, a budget that also will allow our Museum to prosper and grow. This has been an important goal for the Museum for many years, and very hard to achieve. I’d like also to take the time to thank Patty Osmer, our Treasurer, for her hard work and diligence in putting together a series of proposed budgets to consider during the process of finally arriving at a balanced budget. Our Museum has many different projects and priorities. At this time our goals definitely outweigh our financial means, and our budget reflects this. We must work on projects that do have funding behind them though, and one of our main and constant priorities is to maintain train service with all the support behind it.

            Fortunately before you know it, winter will be behind us. Therefore we must begin planning for our upcoming season. Our continuing projects will be the restorations of the NYC wooden caboose, the Pennsylvania Rail Post Office car, the #1455 Boston & Maine steam locomotive, and RS11 #1402 locomotive. These all are projects that do at least have some funding behind them to continue forward. My main priority this season is to stabilize and rebuild the turntable lead switch and try to stabilize the #42 track wherever possible. Of course this is a major project for us, and I need your help. I’ll be starting this task as soon as the frost subsides, and the ground stabilizes. I would plan on meeting on Saturday mornings at 10am to begin this construction work. I’m hoping you can join me and others in preserving railroad history at the DRM, and becoming part of our own history at the Museum.